Thursday, October 19, 2006

Attracting People with Mixed Ideologies

As many have noted, most people are neither "liberals" nor "conservatives" nor the "split the difference" pseudo-centrists that seem to populate the much of the media and swaths of the Democratic establishment, but rather they have some liberal views, some conservative views, etc.

The GOP has done a good job of attracting such voters, not via appearing to be moderate, but by targetting specific voters' beliefs with code words as well as making such voters more afraid of the left than the right. One doesn't win over such voters by being a moderate, but by emphasizing those aspects of your ideology in which they agree with you as well as those aspects of your opponant's ideology which those voters find scary or at least icky.

However, there is a fly in the ointment -- I've noticed that such voters, in spite of sincere concern about partisanship (e.g. when Dems. do it) display a partisan attachment to Republicans. Indeed, one notices such phenomena as social conservatives who supported Schwarzenegger but now that he's playing nice with Dems., though mainly on issues with which these social conservatives ostensibly agree with the Dems, they have decided to sour on Schwarzenegger. What gives here?

Are maybe some of these self-proclaimed "social conservative, cultural liberal [i.e. reactionary when it comes to matters of teh sex, but liberal when it comes to matters of teh intellect], economic moderate" Republicans maybe less ideologically diverse than even they would admit to themselves? How has the GOP convinced even thinking people that gay marriage and abortion (and, ironically given what I will say next, Dem. partisanship) are so scary that even being bipartisan with Dems. is evil? Part of it is neurotic paranoia: some of these voters have "personal issues" ... but how do we prevent individuals' bits of mishugas from derailing our country?